The personal brain-dump of Garrett Coakley

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

16 January 2006

Via Nature magazine comes this report of a study showing that users form an impression of a site within the first 50 milliseconds of seeing it. A response time much faster than anyone initially thought possible.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.